Since that time absolutely nothing has changed. In fact, the SEC has allowed the stock market to become an even more dangerous place for “retail investors” (mom and pop) to keep their life savings.

The use of “limit orders” has become a joke. The only reason for using a limit order is to let your enemies (the predatory traders) know the maximum extent to which you will allow yourself to be screwed on a trade. Since July of 2009, I have discussed the threat posed to retail investors by the use of High-Frequency Trading (HFT) systems. Computers – programmed with predatory algorithms – can engage in “computerized front-running” through the use of “flash orders” to force your own limit order to be executed at its most extreme expense to you. I discussed this situation in more detail on May 18, 2010.

I rarely use “stop loss” orders. They are used by investors to limit their loss if a stock price sinks. The investor specifies a stop price (based on a percentage of the purchase price which is the maximum amount the investor is willing to lose on the stock). If the stock eventually drops to the price in the stop order, the transaction is initiated and the order goes out to the exchange as a market order – to be filled at the best available price at the time. In other words, there is no guarantee that the order will be filled at the price specified in the stop order. In the “flash crash” on May 6 of 2010, many investors lost their shirts because their stop orders were executed and by the time the investors tried to repurchase the stocks, the prices rebounded to where they were before the flash crash. Worse yet, by the time their stop orders were actually filled, the stock prices had dropped tremendously. Not only did those investors lose money on the stop orders for no good reason – but many chose to buy back their stocks at the pre-crash prices. As a result, they lost twice as much money just because of an emotional attachment to the stock. (Emotional attachment to a particular stock is a bad investment habit.) Since that time, a number of “mini flash crashes” have been engineered by predatory traders on particular stocks, forcing investors off their positions to take losses, which ultimately benefit the predators, who use stealthy tactics to reap those profits without being caught.

Stock exchanges have explicit rules for canceling “clearly erroneous trades” and for triggering so-called circuit breakers that halt trading. None of the trades mentioned in this story met that criteria.

Generally, trades can be canceled if they fall 5% to 10% from the last trade, but the rules vary, depending on the market cap of a company and its trading volume.

Investors still have to notify the exchange within 30 minutes if they want their trade to be canceled.

And because many of the wild swings aren’t extreme enough to be considered “clearly erroneous,” individual investors may not even be aware that certain trades are being executed.

Although the article noted that “(t)he SEC continues to make changes to try to combat the frequency and impact of the mini flash crashes”, there is apparently nothing being done by the SEC to prevent the predatory engineering of those crashes. The SEC is apparently doing nothing to allow investors to unwind trades triggered by those crashes. More important, the SEC is doing nothing to track down and prosecute the culprits responsible for engineering and profiteering from these events.

About TheCenterLane.com

TheCenterLane.com offers opinion, news and commentary on politics, the economy, finance and other random events that either find their way into the news or are ignored by the news reporting business. As the name suggests, our focus will be on what seems to be happening in The Center Lane of American politics and what the view from the Center reveals about the events in the left and right lanes. Your Host, John T. Burke, Jr., earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from Boston College with a double major in Speech Communications and Philosophy. He earned his law degree (Juris Doctor) from the Illinois Institute of Technology / Chicago-Kent College of Law.